RICHARD
WAGNER AND
THE SAGA OF THE VOLSUNGS

Knowledge of
The Saga of the Volsungs provided central inspiration
Richard Wagner when he composed his cycle of music dramas,
the Ring of the Nibelung. This nineteenth-century version
of the Volsung-Nibelung legend is along with Tolkien's work
in the twentieth century best known today. As he had earlier
depicted the courtly world and its ethic in great detail in
Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, Wagner, in composing
the Ring cycle, made less use than is normally assumed of
the version of the story found in the South German Nibelungenlied,
which is essentially a courtly epic. Instead he turned to
the more pagan material and attitudes that he found in the
Scandinavian sources, especially in Eddic poetry and in The
Saga of the Volsungs.

In 1851 Wagner
wrote to a friend concerning the saga:

Already
in Dresden I had all imaginable trouble buying a book that
no longer was to be found in any of the book shops. At last
I found it in the Royal Library. It. . . is called the Völsunga
saga--translated from Old Norse . . . This book I now
need for repeated perusal. . . . I want to have the saga again;
not in order to imitate it. . . rather, to recall once again
exactly every element that I already previously had conceived
from its particular features.

He explored this
mythic world in the Ring cycle as a way of expressing his
reflections on his own period and countrymen, intending the
Ring to be a commentary on the industrial and political
revolutions of the nineteenth century. Wagner himself had
revolutionary yearnings; he was exiled for his participation
in the revolution of 1848.

Not only was
Wagner directly inspired by his own reading of The Saga
of the Volsungs in H. von der Hagen's 1815 German translation,
but the composer was also influenced by the treatment of the
saga in Wilhelm Grimm's Deutscher Heldensage. Wagner
appears to have been especially struck by Grimm's interpretation
of the sibling marriage in the Norse material, and reading
Grimm helped Wagner to form his views about the central importance
of the The Saga of the Volsungs and Eddic poetry. In
adapting the Norse material to his own uses, as elsewhere
in writing his librettos, Wagner took many liberties with
his medieval sources, abridging, changing, condensing, and
combining them freely and imaginatively. The dwarf Alberich,
in the opening scene of the Rhinegold, the prelude
to the cycle, is taken from the Nibelungenlied, where
he is the treasurer of the Nibelung dynasty. The setting in
watery depths comes from the Scandinavian tradition and is
reflected in the account of the dragon Fafnir found in the
saga and in Eddic poetry. The Rhine maidens are borrowed from
German folklore. The company of gods and the story of the
establishment of Walhalla (Valhalla) were freely adapted by
Wagner from the Prose Edda of the thirteenth-century
Icelander, Snorri Sturluson.

In the Valkyrie,
the first of the music dramas that form the main body of the
cycle, Wagner relied heavily on the version of the legends
found in The Saga of the Volsungs. Unlike the music
drama, the saga meanders through many generations of Volsungs
before reaching Sigurd. In the saga, Sigurd's half brother
Sinfjotli is of incestuous birth; Wagner transfers this motif,
and the dramatic story that surrounds it, to his principal
hero, Siegfried (Sigurd). The wisdom imparted to the hero
by the Valkyrie Brunnehilde (the Norse Brynhild), whom Wagner
makes a daughter of Wotan, is an important element in Siegfried's
maturation process and one that is most fully described in
the Norse material. The fourth and final music drama, the
Twilight of the Gods, reflects Wagner's familiarity
with the plot structure of the Nibelungenlied. In this
section of the cycle, the role of the villain Hagen (Hogni
in the saga) comes principally from the Nibelungenlied, as
does the sequence in which Siegfried is killed.

The portrayal
of the father of the gods illustrates better than anything
else the difference between Wagner's version and his sources.
The intervention of Odin (Wotan) is more sporadic and less
purposeful in the saga than in Wagner's drama. In the Ring,
the god's actions are motivated by an overriding aim, to regain
possession of the magical ring and thus to reassert control
over the world. Wotan's deliberate plotting to produce a hero
who would regain for him the lost ring and the golden hoard
can be seen as a critique of the acquisitiveness of the Industrial
Age. Wagner added the dimension of political power to the
qualities of the ring. In the Scandinavian sources magic rings
possess the power to generate wealth and they carry curses,
but Wagner's ring also grants its bearer the power to rule
the world. The source for this quality seems to have been
a relatively insignificant line from the Nibelungenlied,
which says that the Nibelung treasure included a tiny golden
wand that could make its possessor the lord of all mankind.

In Siegfried,
Wagner followed the Norse tradition most closely. Wagnerites
will quickly recognize the saga's version of the hero's youth,
the dragon slaying, the roasting of the monster's heart, and
the singing birds that lead him to the sleeping heroine. The
mythical pagan world of the saga comes vividly alive in this
part of the cycle, although the romantic ideals of the nineteenth
century repeatedly dominate Wagner's presentation. At times
we can perceive the dramatic reasons for Wagner's changes.
Whereas Sigurd in The Saga of the Volsungs is treacherously
killed in bed, Wagner followed the German version which has
the hero die in a splendid forest setting, providing the composer
with an opportunity to have his music reflect forest and mountain
scenes. Once the hero is dead, however, Wagner returns to
the version found in the saga for Brynhild's final immolation
by fire, and he ends the entire cycle of music dramas in a
burst of pagan glory.

Reshaping his
Norse sources, Wagner united two stories, unconnected in their
Norse forms: the tale of Sigurd and the account of Ragnarök,
the downfall of the Norse gods. In Wagner's version, the flames
of Siegfried's funeral pyre rise to ignite Walhalla, bringing
about the twilight of the gods. Wagner's outlook is strongly
conditioned by Völuspá, a powerful Eddic
poem that presents all of cosmic history as inevitably leading
to the cataclysmic doom of Ragnarök. In Völuspá,
Odin calls up from her grave a dead giantess to prophesy for
him the fate of the gods; this scene was probably a model
for Wotan's confrontation with the earth goddess, Erda, in
the Ring. Although now generally translated as "the
fate of the gods," the word Ragnarök was
earlier interpreted by scholars to mean "the twilight
of the gods." Wagner translated this into German as Götterdämmerung.

The Saga
of the Volsungs says that its hero's "name is known
in all tongues north of the Greek Ocean, and so it must remain
while the world endures." Wagner's Ring cycle has helped
to make this thirteenth-century statement true.